Guatemala has the largest Protestant share of any country in Latin America, close to parity with Catholicism, and the shift can be dated. Evangelical and Pentecostal churches grew steadily from the 1950s, accelerated sharply after the earthquake of 1976, when North American evangelical relief arrived in quantity and stayed, and gained a political profile under Efrain Rios Montt, a Pentecostal general who took power by coup in 1982.
Those years are also when the state made war on the Maya highlands. The army's counterinsurgency campaign destroyed hundreds of villages and killed tens of thousands of people, overwhelmingly indigenous, and it destroyed religious leadership along with everything else: catechists were targeted as subversives, and Maya ritual specialists were killed or driven out. A United Nations backed commission concluded in 1999 that acts of genocide had been committed.
The Catholic Church produced its own accounting first. The Recovery of Historical Memory project, known as REMHI, collected thousands of testimonies through parish networks and was published in April 1998 under the direction of Bishop Juan Gerardi. He was beaten to death in his garage two days after presenting it. Military officers were later convicted of the killing.
The 1996 peace accords included a formal agreement on the identity and rights of indigenous peoples that recognised Maya spirituality and undertook to guarantee access to ceremonial sites. Implementation has been partial, and a law on sacred sites has been before congress for many years without passing.
Popular devotion has its own figures, notably Maximon, also called San Simon, an image that receives cigars and liquor and is housed in rotation by member households of a confraternity.